Feedback collection to improve maternity services

Ipsos MORI was commissioned by NHS England in February 2018 to understand how maternity services currently collect and use feedback from women to improve services, and to explore the opportunities for the collection of digital feedback in maternity services with the dual purposes of national benchmarking and local service improvement.

The author(s)

Earlier this year as part of the Data and Information Sharing workstream of NHS England’s Maternity Transformation Programme (MTP), NHS England commissioned Ipsos MORI to investigate how maternity services are collecting feedback from women digitally. This included the development of recommendations on how to improve digital data collection and exploring the feasibility of collecting real-time data that could drive continuous improvements in care locally and allow for national benchmarking.

The research included:

Four focus groups with women who were pregnant or had recently given birth, to understand their experiences of and attitudes towards providing feedback on maternity services, including using digital methods to provide feedback.

Nine case studies totalling 25 interviews with staff working in maternity services and patient experience teams, suppliers of feedback collection, and Maternity Voices Partnership representatives. The purpose of the case studies was to understand how feedback is currently collected and used in maternity services, and the benefits and challenges of doing this.

An online survey sent to the Heads of Patient Experience at 135 NHS trusts providing maternity services, in order to better understand current feedback collection across maternity services.

A workshop bringing together representatives from NHS England, the CQC, NHS Digital, the third sector, a number of NHS trusts and National Maternity Voices representing MVPs. The workshop was used to discuss findings from the other elements of the research and to explore the feasibility and implications of potential solutions for digital data collection which could be used for both national benchmarking and local service improvement. Insights gleaned from the workshop were used to inform the reports.

Two separate reports with different purposes have been created from this research. Both of these reports can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. The first is a national level report aimed at NHS England which provides recommendations on the implementation of feedback collection in maternity services. The second report focuses on how feedback can be collected and used in order to improve maternity services, providing examples of best practice and points to consider when collecting feedback digitally.